DaVita, a US-found healthcare organisation and a leader in quality dialysis care, went on an exponential growth internationally in 2011. Opening numerous new facilities and setting up a new head office in Europe brought along multiple challenges for recruitment. Let’s see how Gwen Burbidge, head of HR Europe & Middle East, managed to both 1) find skilled staff for its new medical facilities around the world and 2) recruit the highly-diverse professionals needed for their new European head office in London.

We spoke to Gwen Burbidge, appointed Head of HR Europe & Middle East in 2013, whose main mission at the time was to find qualified staff for the DaVita headquarters in London and the various worldwide-located clinics in her portfolio. This is her story on recruiting skilled professionals for the regions of Europe & the Middle East with the help of VONQ and VONQ’s recruitment technology.

The exponential international growth brought along numerous challenges for Recruitment

DaVita was going through an exponential growth, especially in the regions of Europe & Middle East, with its numerous acquired or newly-built cliniques which required hiring an enormous amount of qualified staff within a short period of time:

“In Saudi Arabia, for example, we were awarded a tender to build 75 clinics to treat around 5000 patients. You can imagine what a challenge it was to reach and recruit the right people for all those establishments. In Saudi Arabia, in particular, we were also struggling with finding locally-trained medical staff, so we had to look into other markets, such as the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Jordan and Egypt, to recruit the doctors and nurses we needed for our Saudi Arabia facilities.”.

Finding qualified staff for its new international head office in London

In 2017, DaVita decides to open a new international head office in London and so Gwen’s focus shifted to filling in all the diverse functions needed for the new location:

“We do not have a recruiter in London, so we had to pick up the recruitment for the head office in London from Amsterdam. The diversity in functions we needed made recruiting for the new head office of DaVita quite a challenge.”.

Previously, all job distribution via media channels for the DaVita open positions was done from the US office. When Gwen started working at the organisation, though, she immediately started exploring new possibilities and recruitment technologies to do the job distribution in-house. This is how DaVita started relying on VONQ and VONQ’s recruitment technology:

“I now use the VONQ’s ATS Qandidate to manage my jobs and VONQ’s Recruitment Technology to prepare and order my job campaigns, without the need for help from a third party. I no longer have to go on LinkedIn or Indeed to request an account there, upload my jobs and arrange all related payment. This is now all being taken care of by VONQ’s recruitment technology.

I can now create and post a job campaign online very fast and with minimal effort, which is of great importance for me. VONQ’s recruitment technology offers a recommendation on the most relevant media channels per country and target group. Based on our expertise, we sometimes have a preference for a specific media channel, so we are happy that we can also directly add it and give it an extra boost without leaving the platform.“

A highly successful international recruitment marketing campaign with an average of EUR 34 per application

As a result of relying on the new recruitment technology and the newly-acquired know-how, DaVita managed to fill in all job openings for their head office in London from their Amsterdam location:

“Thanks to the recruitment marketing campaign we’ve launched, we were able to find all the qualified professionals we needed for our head office in London, including difficult to fill functions, such as a Company Secretary, an FP & a Manager and an International Transaction Director.

We’ve learnt that the combination of niche channels (e.g. Legal Week jobs), generic channels (e.g. Indeed) and social media channels (e.g. LinkedIn) always guarantees a nice mix of candidates. For the vacancy Company Secretary, for example, we managed to generate a total of 45 applications with an investment of 1,547 euros only. This makes 34 euros per candidate, and that is within a short period of time!“

Eager to get started?

Did you get inspired by the great results that DaVita realised within such a short period of time? Are you curious to hear more about how VONQ’s recruitment technology can help you solve your recruitment challenges?